Generalizing wildy, perhaps inaccurately:
Impy, you sound like an Epicurean. "atoms and the void" big scale, "me and my friends in this garden" small scale, avoiding politics on the middle scale. The last bit struck me as a flaw, even as a kid. There's no intrinsic value on a big scale, no, but our personal value on the small scale only gets to exist because it's embedded in a middle scale which is providing food, law, medicines, etc. So ignoring it seems not just self-oriented but selfish and short-sighted. Happily for me, I can look back to before Epicurus, and see Democritus saying "yes, dealing with politics sucks and is bad for your serenity, but if someone like you doesn't do it then politics will get even worse for your serenity, so suck it up."
Not that I'm any great activist or anything, but that's my personality, not my philosophy.
Civilization -- literally, as in "life in cities" -- depends on our being able to care about or value, to some degree, more than the
150 monkeys we can track in our personal lives.
"In other words, our actions may change the big picture, but it's still just a picture and it doesn't matter what it's a picture of, except to us as individuals in whether or not we happen to like it."
Right, but it *does* matter to us, and that matters, because it matters to us. And we need for there to be a picture for us to exist in to look at it.
"If nothing we do means anything, the only thing that means anything is what we do." -- Joss Whedon (Angel)